Rhubarb cheesecake and 2007 Peller Estates Cabernet Franc Ice Wine

With four days in Edinburgh and three at the Ballymaloe Food & Drink Litfest in Co Cork this weekend I’ve been overwhelmed with good food and drink matches but as I haven’t singled out a dessert for a while I’m making Tom Kitchin’s Rhubarb cheesecake my hero dish this week.

Frankly I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t serve cheesecake with rhubarb. It’s the most perfect combination, especially with a scoop of rhubarb sorbet.

I confess I’d never have thought of pairing it with a red Canadian icewine so full marks to the sommelier at The Kitchin for coming up that one. It was paler than you might imagine for a red wine with more than a hint of strawberries and rhubarb itself which worked really well with the cheesecake. And the intense sweetness and viscosity dealt with the sorbet which can kill lighter dessert wines.

The 2007 doesn’t seem to be available but you can buy the 2008 from Slurp for £15.35 a quarter bottle or the 2010 vintage for £41.99 a bottle from Invinity wines (see wine-searcher.com for other stockists)

Not cheap but a real show-off pairing!

Chocolate and chilli cheesecake and Merlot

You may be unconvinced about the wisdom of incorporating chilli into achocolate cheesecake, let alone accompanying it with Merlot but bear with me!

This off-the-wall pairing is one I experienced last week at a monthly supper club in Topsham near Exeter run by a friend Marc Millon who owns a small Italian wine importing business called Club Vino. The meal was devised to celebrate his son Guy’s six week road-trip round the States this summer and as Guy also happens to be one of the collaborators on my Ultimate Student Cookbook we wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Guy and his girlfriend Claire recreated the cheesecake from one they ate on their travels. Now, I must confess I’m not a normally a huge fan of cheesecake, let alone chocolate ones but I have to say it was a triumph, the spiciness of the chilli and the tanginess of the lime cutting through the richness of the chocolate and cheese.

It also tasted curiously good with the Californian Merlot I was drinking - an inexpensive label called Wandering Bear. Merlot is a grape variety that is often described as having chocolatey notes itself but these would not normally be in evidence when paired with chocolate. But with this particular cheesecake it tasted great - the chilli and lime zest bringing out all its lush fruitiness.

You can try this trick with other soft full-bodied reds and chocolate for adventurous guests though I don’t promise it will always hit the spot. But it stands to reason when you think of it. Chocolate almost always works with red berries so why not with a drink that incorporates those flavours (port being another example)? Just don't try it with a wine with marked acidity or one that is too tannic.

Cherry beer and cheesecake

If you’ve never tasted a fruit beer you might think this pairing sounds bizarre. If you have you can probably imagine just how good it would taste.

Fruit flavoured beers are nothing new but unlike many flavoured drinks they have real integrity, with a natural fresh fruit flavour. The best examples come from Belgium where they’re called by the Flemish name Kriek. They’re made by combining a lambic beer (one fermented from wild yeasts) with fresh cherry juice and are wonderfully tart and refreshing. The best example is Lindemans which comes packaged in a very pretty bottle with a paper wrapping.

You can drink a cherry beer with savoury foods (my favourite matches are with duck and with white-rinded cheeses such as Brie and Camembert) but I particularly like them with a creamy American-style cheesecake topped with fresh red berries including cherries. (The great thing about beer, as opposed to wine, is that because of the carbonation you can match pretty well identical flavours in your food and your drink without one knocking the other out).

Raspberry beer (Frambozen) is delicious with plain or berry-topped cheesecakes too.